Mobile communication devices are becoming increasingly popular for business and personal use due to a relatively recent increase in number of services and features that the devices and mobile infrastructures support. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and smart phones. While their reduced size is an advantage to portability, limitations in download bandwidth and device screen size give rise to challenges in viewing large documents with multiple embedded tables, having a large number of columns and rows for presenting information in a tabular format.
For wireless devices that support viewing of attachments, this represents a large amount of information for downloading, requiring a large amount of bandwidth and the associated cost thereof. Additionally, the user must wait for an extended period of time while the device is downloading the complete table.
Since mobile communication devices have limited screen real estate, it is known in the art to provide an Attachment Server (AS) for delivering “on-demand” content to wireless device users in order to minimize bandwidth, and device CPU/memory usage. When the user of a wireless device views a document attachment that uses tables, the Attachment Server typically downloads the document text to the Attachment Viewer (AV) on the mobile device along with a selectable link (e.g. [Table: N]), rather than the entire table contents. The user can then retrieve the entire table, if desired, by selecting the link. By downloading only the text and a link to the table, and providing the user with an option for retrieving or viewing the entire table attachment, such existing architectures thereby adhere to the on-demand design principle set forth above.
Unfortunately, the selectable link (e.g. [Table: N]) provides no information relating to the actual content of the table. Some documents use tables extensively to present information. Indeed, in some cases the entire document is created using only tables containing the entire textual content. These types of table-centric documents, when viewed on the wireless device through the foregoing on-demand architecture, are represented only by a large number of selectable table links, without any other textual information. For these types of documents the user is unable to discern which of the table(s) contain information that is relevant to them and thus should be retrieved. The user is therefore required to retrieve some, if not all, of the tables in the document in order to identify any table(s) of interest. Consequently, the design principle of offering on-demand retrieval, wherever possible, is defeated by such multiple downloads of irrelevant attachment parts.